Chris Brand’s Comments

Personally, I'm partial to the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy version - "To summarize: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it."

Having followed a number of court cases where there are lots of arguments about the exact meaning of specific words used in the legislation, I'm waiting to see lawyers arguing about this phrasing.
"The legislation included the word "unwanted". That word must have been put there for a reason. The reason must be to distinguish it from "wanted harassment". Clearly to the person receiving the harassment, it's always unwanted, so this must refer to the person doing the harassing, to distinguish it from "accidental harassment". So as long as the person doing the harassing does so intentionally, it's not covered by this statute".

More than 50% more petitions about civil rights than about the economy ? And how much time do they spend debating those two issues ? Even more telling, how much time was devoted to campaigning on those two issues ?

So if it's not the average voter who's mostly concerned about the economy, who is it ? Perhaps the politicians themselves and their backers ?

I think respect goes both ways. As the gift-giver, it shows a huge lack of respect to think that you should have any say over what happens to the gift after it's been given. It's a gift. It's theirs. They can give it away, sell it, burn it, whatever. If you didn't want them to have full control over it, you shouldn't have given it to them.

The attitude you espouse seems very similar to the companies who say "I'm selling you this, but after you've bought it, I'm still going to impose the following rules..."

That is interesting, not least because (a) it's not the purchaser doing the ripping, and (b) there is apparently some sort of license between Amazon and the record companies.

In Canada, C-11 made it so that your "private copies" were only legal if you continued to own the originals, but these don't sound like "private copies", they sound like freebies given to you by Amazon, in accordance with their license with the record companies.

I guess it would come down to what conditions they impose on you when they give you (access to) the MP3s.

Well personally, I'm quite happy to see these arguments from the MPAA and friends about fair use, because I fully intend to tell my government "As the MPAA have told the Australian government [citation], changing any law creates too much legal uncertainty due to the lack of precedent and case history. Therefore, it's too dangerous to ratify CETA/TPP".

From the article - "Allowing government agencies to reject FOIA requests because they don't like how the information is being used or are worried about public response is a big step in a very wrong direction".

Of course that was towards the end. Perhaps you didn't get all the way down there before writing this comment ?

I read that block quote all the way through twice. It's fascinating that you don't need to change a single word to read it as a condemnation of the action against megaupload. It's all in your underlying assumptions. If you believe that all the various things mentioned as impacted were bad, then the quote says what a great thing the shutdown was. If you think of the things affected as legitimate, then the quote works just as well to say how terrible the shutdown of megaupload was.

In general, I can do what I like with things I buy (not entirely true, but very close)...
Unless the thing embodies a copyrighted work...
Unless what I want to do is fair use...
Unless that fair use is prevented by a DRM...
Unless there's an exception to the "you can't break DRM" rule for this use.

The fact that it gets this complicated to decide what is legal is a great indication that copyright itself hurts the free market (the free market operates right at the top, where I can certainly buy and sell things I own). The concept of "fair use" (and the "limited times" part of copyright) only exists because otherwise copyright would interfere way too much with everyday life. The fact that the introduction of laws protecting DRM introduce exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions to the exception to the rule that I can generally do what I like with things I own should have been a huge red flag to the people drafting the DMCA.

Seems to me that any businessman would say "I don't care about moral arguments, where's the Return On Investment ?", and the straight answer is that it's with getting the 92% to spend (more), not throwing money away trying to sue the 8%.